Will Apps Really Kill The Web?

How many times will Wired predict the death of the web browser before it actually happens?

All kidding aside, the web’s percentage of total Internet traffic is shrinking.  Video is mostly to blame, but it begs the question concerning what else will erode the traditional model of viewing content via a web browser.  Depending largely on device adoption, apps may be a big part of that.

That’s the topic of this week’s piece in iMedia. Yes, apps may be the flavor of the month.  Fast Company even believes we’re in an app bubble.  But, if done the right way, apps give people a way to access utility and content from mobile devices that doesn’t involve awkward fumbling with a mobile browser.  I think its inarguable that utility is the key here – content is nice, but it’s more compelling to download an app that gives access to functionality and utility that otherwise wouldn’t be available on a mobile device (or would be too clumsy via a mobile web browser).  So brands that expect to debut apps that merely push content at users could probably stand to re-evaluate that tactic.

Apps may cannibalize web browsing to a degree, but they won’t kill web browsing as we know it.  One good reason?  We still engage in quite a bit of casual content consumption that’s probably best served up in a browser.  Another good reason?  New media channels don’t obliterate old ones.  They merely erode them.

The best way for marketers to make sense of the app mania is to think about what utility consumers expect from your brand.  If you start with “how can I push marketing messages to my consumer?” you’ll likely fail.  If you start with “what utility can I extend to the consumer that will be useful and help keep my brand top of mind?” you’ll do better.  So if you’re Gibson Guitars, an app that pulls in video from your YouTube channel probably won’t be as successful as a lightly-branded app that shows chord fingerings.  Sponsored utility is the name of the game.

Should Coke Follow Pepsi on Twitter?

Rupal Parekh posed some interesting questions with a Twitter-themed post on AdAge’s DigitalNEXT blog.  Among those questions was whether or not Bill Gates should return Eric Schmidt’s follow.

Doesn’t the notion of two direct competitors following one another seem ripe for an explosive post on reddit or Digg?  I can see such a thing becoming front-page news on the social news sites and then ending up as a mentionable on the morning news.  But Parekh brings up an interesting point.  (And it’s not interesting simply because he quoted me…)  What can we learn from following our competitors?

I see it as something not unlike trying to discern digital strategy from watching competitive creative executions in digital display advertising.  If all you ever see from a competitor is a bunch of ads linking to coupons and promotions, you might think that that’s how they’ve pigeonholed digital display advertising within the organization.  In that case, a sudden burst of brand awareness advertising would be unexpected.

I think a lot can be learned from following competitors.  If it’s a personal feed from a C-level executive at a competitor, you might learn a bit about where their head is at.  If it’s a brand feed, you might learn from the totality of the tweets posted what the overall strategy and role of Twitter might be.  Of course, these roles can change over time, but it’s important to note these things and see where your competitors have experimented and eventually settled on the right role for Twitter for that particular time and brand.

Of course, Twitter isn’t the only channel that can deliver insight on a competitor’s social media strategy.  You also need to look at what they’re doing with social networks like Facebook, sharing sites like Flickr and YouTube, community sites and more.  Not just to see how many “likes” or followers they have, but to see what they’re trying to do to build their business.  Do they run contests or sweepstakes?  Are they driving traffic to a brand site?  Are they trying to start one-on-one dialogues with customers?  Each of these represents a marked path in terms of a social media strategy, so it’s important to ask the right questions as you’re looking at a brand’s presence in social media.

What B2B Marketers Can Learn from B2C

B2B Magazine just ran a short piece I wrote on how B2B marketers can borrow digital tactics from the business to consumer side of digital.

One of the things we really love about working in the B2B space is that it has its own unique challenges for reaching the right audience.  Whereas a broad-appeal B2C product might want to reach hundreds of millions, a B2B product might be trying to reach a corporate audience that numbers in the tens of thousands.  Finding ways to creatively reach the right people is a must for these B2B campaigns, and media plans have to consider ways of reaching a niche audience online other than simply picking the websites of the magazines that appear on the print schedule.  It’s a terrific challenge that we enjoy here.

Aside from advanced targeting, one of the ways we’re adding value for our B2B clients is in the realm of measurement.  The publishers we work with on the B2B side of the business tend to small – not exactly fitting the profile of a comScore 500 site.  So many of them haven’t heard of measurement technologies we might use on the consumer side.  What’s particularly cool about this is that we’ve had the opportunity to work with some of these small publishers to execute their first brand studies.  One surprise we found was that completion rates for surveys were much higher than they typically are in consumer advertising.  And this makes sense – when you’re reaching the right people with a B2B campaign, you won’t have any shortage of people willing to share their opinions about advertising to their particular business sector.

Other things that can be borrowed from the consumer sector?  Rich media technologies, advanced ad metrics and approaches to search marketing.  In the coming months, we’ll be talking a lot more about this stuff.  Stay tuned.

Nobody Cares

Interesting title for a post, no?

I’ve said these two words countless times over the past few years as people within our industry talk about various justifications for the work they’re doing in online targeting, transactional media buying and data mining.  And now the transactional half of the industry is paying the price.

We do this without using Personally Identifiable Information…

Nobody cares.  They don’t want to know about the technical jiu-jitsu you used to aggregate data points on them.  They just know that what you know about them makes them uncomfortable.

But…but… the traditional direct marketing industry does things that are waaaaay more invasive.

Nobody cares.  Besides, your mother should have taught you better.  Since when do we justify doing something creepy by pointing at someone else’s creepy behavior?  Have you not noticed that people don’t much like junk mail, either?

Our privacy and opt-out policies are in compliance with industry best practices.

Nobody cares.  Those little seals of approval all over your rarely-visited privacy page and all your marketing materials didn’t get there because some governing board decided to ask web users how they feel about being tracked and targeted.

And so it came to pass, in a manner similar to how I thought it would, that someone wrote a high-profile yet ham-handed exposé (actually, a series of them) that came decidedly from the consumer’s point of view and illuminated the bigger picture for digital marketers: Nobody cares much how this stuff works.  They just don’t want you building digital dossiers on them.

“So,” you might be saying to yourself, “if I’m the type of marketer who wants to market digitally, but also wants to avoid all these sketchy targeting methods, what do I do?”

Call us – 212-647-8436.  Or drop us a line.  Our clients have a clear path to continued success, even if Congress decides to sweep away the third-party cookie and put an end to all this stuff.  We can also tell you about how The Wall Street Journal has only scratched the surface when it comes to this article series.  Are your current digital marketing plans at risk?  We can advise you.

Opportunity for Rep Firms?

I think rep firms can make a comeback.

Publishers are continuing to monetize through exchanges, regardless of how damaging it can be to their business in the long term.  They’re also juggling networks and trying to figure out which of the gazillion ad networks can get them the best return on inventory that otherwise might not sell.  All the while, nobody is putting up numbers like the direct sales force.

It used to be that several ad sellers were based in the old rep firm model.  Those sellers might represent several sites at once, but they held their publisher clients in higher esteem than an ad network might today.  And it worked.  That’s why it’s curious to me why rep firms aren’t as popular as they once were.  It could be that short-term growth pressure selects against them, since they’re tough to scale once salespeople are maxed out on the number of sites they can reliably represent.  But it’s an opportunity for a private businessperson who wants a steady business that can reliably generate a significant profit every year.

In any case, I think the uncertainty generated by the lack of price and data transparency in the arbitrage business might lead some publishers to be looking for rep firms rather than networks to join.  I’ve already gotten a few e-mails in response to my column – from publishers looking to know who the good rep firms are.  So maybe there’s more demand than one might think…

Influentials Don’t Influence Old Spice Viralness?

So, the Old Spice social campaign seems to have dominated digital marketing discussions for the past few days.  Seems like industry discussion lists, advertising trades and now the mainstream media are all over this one.

Sign me up as a fan.  I’m very pleasantly surprised that something like this can take hold in some select vehicles within the social sphere and bubble up in a very significant way to the mainstream media, without the benefit of a multi-million dollar ad commitment.  One site credits this campaign with having generated almost 6 million views and over 22,000 comments in 24 hours.   One of the things I find particularly interesting, though, is that we’ve watched the idea of “The Influentials” get trashed for the past two and a half years, with suspicious eyes being cast at anyone who mentions “targeting influencers” in marketing meetings.  Yet, how did Wieden + Kennedy prioritize who got a customized message?  In part by influence.

This is why Peter Shankman gets a shout out, while I probably wouldn’t.

Not Now

“Not Now.”  That was the original headline on my recent iMedia piece, before my editor changed it.

I wanted that headline because there are actually two huge problems with the state of digital ad targeting.  The first is that we’ve gone well past the fail safe line that DoubleClick and other companies stepped over in 2000, as it pertains to data profiling and consumer privacy.  The second is that a lot of it is coming to a head now, while there’s draft legislation on the table concerning digital consumer privacy.  Putting aside the first issue for a second, I can’t fathom why anyone would want to kick up the dust on ad targeting right now.  It could attract the wrong kind of attention and result in the typical ham-handed government regulatory response that we all want to avoid.  The simplest and easiest thing to do would be for the U.S. Government to get rid of the third party cookie.  This would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, but it’s exactly the type of thing that I’d expect from Congress.

Getting back to the first issue for a moment…  You’re going to be hear

Waiting for pixel.adserver.com…

We should really be asking ourselves whether, as an industry, we’re overburdening our ad delivery infrastructure.

Between ad exchanges, verification, rich media and other services responsible for multiple server calls whenever an ad is delivered, we’re introducing way more potential failure points into the process than was ever really intended.  It makes me wonder how many straws away from a broken back we are.  How many pages have you tried to visit lately where the delivery of the content is held up by waiting for some random adserver pixel to fire?

Something’s Got To Give

The transactional part of our business is about to undergo some significant change, in my opinion.  I’m not talking about the brand-oriented, placement-centric portion of digital display.  I’m talking about the action-oriented piece that is mostly focused on delivering Cost Per Whatevers at a manageable price.

There’s a big movement underway for brand protection, and more than a half dozen companies are credibly in the space with reasonably useful tools.  I’m predicting that this movement will be successful and that new technologies will fall into widespread use, blowing the lid off of transactional buys.  When this happens, advertisers are going to realize they’ve been advertising in places that they never expected to, and have been doing so for quite some time.  This will lead to an attempt to more accurately control placement for transactional buys.  As you might know, advertisers can exercise control over environment or pricing, but can’t drive both down simultaneously.

Many advertisers will have an additional “A ha!” moment.  They’ll see that the small slice of network inventory (10% or less) that passes for “premium” plays a key role in the success of their campaigns, while the rest is largely backfill.  The most obvious result of this realization will be increased demand for premium inventory, driving prices up for the top ad inventory on quality sites.

Much of this inventory overlaps with the inventory most interesting to brand advertisers, who look to impact brand attributes with their advertising instead of driving direct sales or clicks.  Increased demand will mean higher prices for premium inventory and drops in value for junk inventory, widening the chasm between what’s valuable and what’s not.

So, to the extent that the brand protection technologies become standard throughout the industry, we’ll likely see widespread changes in pricing dynamic.  When control is exercised over environment, something has to give.  That something is pricing.

On Recognizing and Disarming Trolls

My piece on iMedia is getting a good deal of attention this week, particularly in the Twitter-sphere.  That’s good, partly because it’s a bit challenging to come up with new column topics and feedback drives topic selection in a lot of cases.  This week’s piece about Internet trolls is a good example of that, since it was an expansion on a prior piece that someone asked for additional detail on.

Trolls are a funny sort. The funny thing though (to me) is that we can almost instantly recognize trolling behavior, but we often have trouble articulating why we think someone is trolling.  It’s like spam – we always immediately recognize spam, but we have a hard time describing what constitutes spam to a spam firewall that can filter it out for us.  We just know it when we see it.

Trolling is much the same way.  We know when someone posts something to one of our online communities with the intention to cause an uproar or to get a rise out of a specific group of community participants.  Yet, we see the damage that trolls can do when it comes to causing valuable community members to quit, or community moderators to have to invest too much time trying to keep conversations on track.  So how do you combat Internet trolls when you can’t articulate what it is about their behavior that makes them trolls?

Well, the old DNFTT (Do Not Feed The Trolls) thing works, but understanding the motivation behind different kinds of trolling behavior is also a big help.  In the linked piece, I spent some time delving into the motivations for some of the most popular kinds of trolling behavior.  This could have been a much longer piece and wasn’t intended to be a comprehensive guide, but it should help some of you who are in charge of moderating and growing Internet communities.  I hope it’s helpful.